Katrina vanden Heuvel: The Case For Elizabeth Warren

[marmar]

from The Nation:



Elizabeth Warren should be the top contender to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. After all, it was her brainchild, her baby.

But instead of celebrating the leadership and creativity of Harvard law professor and Congressional Oversight Panel chair Elizabeth Warren, reports are that she faces opposition from the bankers' BFF, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Also, Senator Chris Dodd, chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, kicked off the whispering campaign about her appointment with his question, "Is she confirmable?"

It's no mystery why the corporate/big business crowd opposes her. The effectiveness of the financial reform bill depends entirely on the regulators—it cedes them new power, but it doesn't mandate systemic change. So the bankers and lobbyists want to diminish regulation as much as they can, which means opposing a determined and smart Warren.

Rather than sabotaging Warren's prospects, Dodd and the administration, especially President Obama, should be touting the fact that Warren has been one of the leading activists and thinkers about what the bureau could get done, and that her stewardship led to it being one of the things we can celebrate in the final bill.

In her folksy, plainspoken way, Warren—who hails from Oklahoma and is a former Methodist Sunday school teacher—has articulated how the agency could help ordinary people, providing a small amount of power in a system that's weighted against them. She has such an honest, fair, decent and clear way of talking about what government can do to serve the common good. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blog/37743/case-elizabeth-warren

[ThomWV]

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